I know. I didn't believe it. After 6 computers, my best one to date crashes and burns in 2 years. My last back-up was a year ago.I know, stupid.I lost alot of repaints and models, flyables and AI.So I can begin to retrieve them, would the community please send me the links (favorites) for:-FS Painter's site-Other sites with FS Painter repaints and models-AI Aardvark (I think it's ai-aardvark.com)-Your favorite safe sites for freeware downloads.-A site for WinzipAny and all help will be much appreciated.The loss was great. I had just finished an around the world tripand had done AFCAD and Flight plans for lots and lots of cities enroute.Thanks Again for any help!! Rick (Still waiting for warm weather in Milw WI)

hmm...google.com?

I have a couple of thoughts. You didn't describe the nature of the crash, and in particular whether the situation was that the computer wouldn't start up after it had been off for a while. If that's what happened, I've also had that happen twice myself with my current drive over the last few weeks, and I was eventually able to get the system restarted in both cases. Normally I leave the system on, but on a couple of occasions I had to turn it off. Restarting on that first occasion was when I discovered the hard drive was failing, because I had to try multiple times to get restarted. At first the disk made a sort of metallic clicking sound about once a second, but after perhaps ten tries it started running okay again. Perhaps it just needed to be warmed up a bit. The second time I shut down it was an involuntary situation caused by a planned power outage, and even though it was harder to get the system running again after that, eventually I got it going, notwithstanding all the initial boot-up error messages about hard drive failure. I keep good back-ups on DVDs, but I'm still glad I managed to get it running again (this was about two weeks ago, and it's been fine since), because I wanted to gather a lot more information about my settings and program set-ups to get a new replacement drive up and running. I have a new Seagate drive sitting on the floor which I'll install shortly.So, if it's a case of restarting a system, I was able to do it twice after multiple tries, and perhaps you can too. The other thing I wanted to mention is that there are specialist companies who'll attempt to recover data off bad drives, though I've heard the fees can be steep.

If you are ready to throw the harddrive into the garbage can, here is one more thing that you can try.Put the harddrive in a sealed plastic bag.Put the bag in the freezer for a few hours.Re-install the drive and power up.. if it boots, copyall your files to a CD.Throw out the drive.

why not buy a new harddrive, load it with the os, jumper the old hd as a slave, and see if you can simply retrieve your files.If it still doesn't all access to files, then try the freezer trick with the bad drive.Bob Bernstein

Thanks everyone.Sorry. I didn't know Google was so comprehensive regarding flight sim sites. A few years ago they weren't.Hard drive failed while on the internet. Computer would boot through the bios, and stop. That's as far as it would go.Now I'm no expert here, so it took it to my builder. And as such, the answer was "bad hard drive." Who am I to disagree?It's running fine now, but it's a newbie.I'll try the freezer trick. I didn't know about that. Thanks again. Sorry about the double posting. I didn't see the first this morning, so I thought it hadn't posted.Rick

I had a hard drive fail in less than one year on my previous computer and I am certain it was caused by a loose switch jumper setting on my CDROM drive. I mean that it was very easy to slide the jumper in and out so I replaced it with another. Later I also found that one of my IDE cables was not as tight a fit as it should have been so I replaced that too. Failure of a device can be caused by other problems.

I doubt your files will have been lost. Try Bob's recomendation first. It's worked all the time with me. Only try the freezer trick as a last resort and remember you should never try to re-use your drive after cold shock therapy.

After reading all the threads about the cost of the PMDG 737 series...I read your heading and thought it said HELP...HARD CASH DRIVE :-)Eric

:-)